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From Dichotomy to Dialectic in Antony and Cleopatra

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From Dichotomy to Dialectic in Antony and Cleopatra "The Knot Intrinsicate": From Dichotomy to Dialectic in Antony and Cleopatra by Mariah Robbins A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts April, 2005 I would like to thank Bob Bell for his ideas, his continuous support, and most of all, for his friendship. I would like to dedicate this thesis to my Dad. Without his help, I could not have finished it. For a long time, the polarity of the Egyptian and Roman spheres in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra has been a reliable and valuable means of perceiving the play's action and evaluating its characters. The dichotomy offers a structuring principle that the plot's ambiguity of motives and meanings refuses to provide. John Danby calls it "the trick of using the contraries," adding somewhat dismissively that such a dichotomous theme is "relatively an easy way of organizing the universe."' The idea of a straightforward opposition between Egypt and Rome dominated critical discourse until the last quarter of the twentieth century: "No matter how we regard the play," writes George Lyman Kittredge in his introduction to an edition published in 1966, "we must recognize that in it are mirrored two directly contrasting visions of life and conceptions of value: those of Egypt as opposed to those of Rome-the sensual and wasteful opulence of the East opposed to the cold, bare efficiency of the West. Egypt in this play stands for passion and human weakness, Rome for duty and self-denial: the world of the senses pitted against the world of reason and a fixed morality."2 This persistent critical concept of binary oppositions has more recently been complicated by the growing recognition of the ambiguity that surrounds the divide and blurs the distinctions between the categories: "The play may simplify itself into these national or racial or cultural dichotomies, and atfirst glance it seems easy to draw up a list," A. R. Braunmuller writes in a recent introduction to Antony and Cleopatra. "Thus, according to the Romans and some Egyptians some of the time, Rome represents honor John F. Danby, "A Shakespearean Adjustment," in New Casebooks Antony and Cleopatra, edited by John Drakakis (London: Macmillan, 1994), 33-55. 2 George Lyman Kittredge, ed., The Kittredge Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Waltham: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1966), introduction. and duty while Egypt is a place of distracting sensual pleasure" (my italic^).^ ~edefining the terms, Terence Hawkes became the first to associate Egypt with the feminine and Rome with the masculine: "If Egypt emphasizes the body, one level of language, one sort of 'love,' and the concomitant womanly powers of Cleopatra, Rome is a place of words, another level of language, another kind of love, and of self-confident 'manly' prowess," he arguex4 Following the publication of Hawkes' essay in 1975, feminist critics wasted no time in thoroughly revamping the literature concerning the duality, finding a multilayered and fertile ambiguity in the play's portrayal of gender oppositions. Juliet Dusinberre points out the modern audience's implicit entanglement with conceptions of male and female in a play interested in highlighting and deconstructing those conceptions: "In a theatre where Cleopatra is played by a woman, that original boy actor's performance is complicated beyond measure by notions of the masculine and the feminine in circulation amongst a disparate and fragmented a~dience."~ Despite the qualifications of recent critics, many readers still locate the play's divide along the reasonlpassion faultline, and most critics see the split as an opportunity to find certainty in this highly illogical play. The dichotomization of Antony and Cleopatra's world provides an efficient structure for understanding, which may explain why many readers, audiences, and critics have clung for so long to the idea of the divided spheres; without this foundation, attempts to apply conventional logic or morality founder. Why is it, then, that this play defies complete understanding? While Hamlet, A. R. Braunmuller, ed., The Pelican Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, (New York: Penguin Group, 1999), introduction. 'Terence Hawkes, "'King Lear' and 'Antony and Cleopatra': The Language of Love," in New Casebooks Antony and Cleopatra, edited by John Drakakis (London: Macmillan, 1994), 101- 125. Juliet Dusinberre, "Squeaking Cleopatras: Gender and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra," in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, edited by James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 46-67. Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello all exhibit a distinct murkiness, in these other tragedies "we are usually aware of a few central facts; and we usually have our moral bearings," Janet Adelman contend^.^ 1n Antony and Cleopatra, however, "almost every major action . is in some degree ine~~licable."~ Much Iike Enobarbus, we are denied our deep-seated desire to rationalize an intrinsically confusing situation. In the ensuing search for any shred of certainty on which to base our understanding, we might turn, like the lovers themselves, to a belief in reconciliation or synthesis, ignoring the play's inconsistencies and holding out hope for the peaceful coexistence of Egypt and Rome, feminine and masculine. Or we might, instead, cast our lot with Octavius, maintaining a stubboln belief in the essentialism of the categories and accepting the inevitability of continual explosive conflict. We might imagine Antony, in death, reaching a brilliant epiphany, an illumination that reveals the expanded dimensions of the all-encompassing feminine perspective and the possibilities of ideal mutuality and compatibility. Or perhaps we expect Cleopatra, through her suicide, to emblematize the dazzling multidimensionality and inclusive multiplicity of the Egyptian worldview. We might cherish hope that both protagonists die realizing the value of the other's viewpoint, or even that they ascend, in death, to a transcendent world of harmony above the mess of bifurcated reality. As a means of overcoming the play's ultimate contradictions, any of these approaches might plausibly be argued, and none of them are entirely incorrect; but they all require a certain amount of deliberate 'looking the other way' and scanting inconsistencies. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 14. ' Ibid., 15. Since Shaltespeare's motives and purposes are never more than implicit, we can only speculate why he so purposefully and systematically deprives us of logic and undermines our beliefs. Surely we are encouraged to look beyond the rigid, static categories that define the RomeEgypt dichotomy, to glimpse a world of softened, mutable gender constructions and belief systems-a complex dialectical reality where traditional logic, morality, and norms cease to apply. In its most basic sense, dialectic, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means "the existence or working of opposing forces, tendencies, et~."~It is almost impossible, however, to ignore the term's expanded, Hegelian implications. In the HegeIian sense a dialectic, as a process, is the overcoming of the contradiction between thesis and antithesis by means of synthesis; then, "the synthesis in turn becomes contradicted, and the process repeats itself until final perfection is rea~hed."~~e~el's definition, while useful, implies an achievable sort of peace, or transcendence, that may be reached through continued syntheses; in Antony and Cleopatra, however, there is no such reconciliation, no final synthesis. Shakespeare's vision reveals a "knot intrinsicate / Of life": a world of infinite possibility, where the viewpoints we had previously assumed to be bifurcated coexist, interweave, collide, and rebound, even penetrating the divide between life and death (v.ii.303-4).1° His vision encompasses the complications and contradictions of the play, and holds them in a vast, non-hierarchical space, where they retain their irresolvable nature. Any action may contain elements of the feminine and the The Oxford English Dictionary Online, S.V. "dialectic." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, s.v. "dialectic." lo John Wilders, ed., The Arden Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, (London: Routledge, 1995). All play references from this edition. masculine. No viewpoint holds more importance than another; nor do they exist in rigid, immutable compartments, separate and sterile.'' Who better to introduce the "infinite variety" of this world than the spectacularly theatrical, paradoxical, enigmatic, exuberant, and contradictory Cleopatra (II.ii.246)? Her vibrancy and variety of character precipitate the audience's expanded recognition of the "knot intrin~icate."'~Only Cleopatra, with all her fascinating flaws, has the sheer strength of character to catalyze such a realization, and Shakespeare has left her the last act of the play for precisely this purpose. Though Octavius, the historical victor, is left standing, what remains with us is the vivid, unsettling image of Cleopatra, resplendently attended by her waiting women. Cleopatra's death is the last and the most disconcerting in a series of events and images designed to displace our beliefs-and to displace them to such an extent that, in our search for a new method of understanding, we glimpse the "intrinsicate" possibilities of a dialectical, rather than a dichotomous, perception. At strategic points throughout the play, Shakespeare includes popular-festive
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